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Today we finally called it a day and published “A Russian AFFAIR“, our 2015 Sci-Fi-London 48-Hour challenge! Total time to complete: 18,408 hours.

I wrote a bunch about this two years ago, but in summary:

We wrote, shot and edited this short within the 48 hours, and submitted it to the contest. But due to various disasters during the post-production process on the second day, I wasn’t happy with the final result. Since I felt like the finished film did not do justice to the work we had put in, I decided to withhold the short and work on a ‘remastered’ version.

The main issues with the film were:

The ‘studio’ footage was too dark, making it hard to see Zac’s face almost all the time

The dialogue got quieter at the end while the music got louder, so I had to bring the music volume down to hear the final lines, ruining the dramatic build of Drew’s music

Since being able to see and hear the lead character was fairly important for the short, I decided it was worth another shot.

During a weekend lockdown, Chloe fixed the colour and lighting, bringing Zac’s face into the light and hiding some pesky cables which crept into shot. Over the Bank Holiday weekend just passed, Drew remixed the whole audio, improving all the levels and magically removing the sound of Chloe’s light fan which had plagued us during the shoot. The final film doesn’t show either of those improvements, if you hadn’t seen it initially, but in my opinion, the initial version was unwatchable.

Imagine a secret cult, led by a wizened elder who is flanked by two charismatic lieutenants, one of militant precision, the other of rock-star-like status. The cultists who follow them are each given a mysterious cult name by which they are known amongst themselves, and in addition they believe in a third ‘true’ name which each keeps secret for their whole lives. Once a year, the cult holds a gathering under a full moon. The night includes a great dance, the recounting of thrilling and endearing stories of former and current members, and culminates in the selection of one among them for a ritual sacrifice. So revered is this opportunity, so deluded are those who aspire to it, that the cultists spend much of the night trying to learn who it will be this year, and even the elderly and enfeebled members will strive to take part in the dancing and frolicking for a chance to be chosen.

This year will be different. A known renegade, perhaps a defector, is stalking the perimeter of the merriment waiting for a chance to strike, to save the life of whichever tribute is to die tonight. He and his two fellow defectors finally steal their chance to break in and kidnap the cult leader in the hope of cutting the head off the snake. However, in trying to escape, he comes face-to-face with the militant lieutenant who stands his ground and makes him fight. With the renegade distracted, the cult reveals their ace in the hole, a young cultist with mysterious psychic abilities, so deeply enamoured and damaged by the cult that his eyes are misted and his demeanour childlike in his detachment from reality. He swiftly dispatches of the renegade with his psychic powers and restores the cult leader to the gathering. The elder decides to make a point of solidarity by choosing one of their elderly outcasts as this year’s sacrifice. She weeps with blind delight as she is led to the slaughter, and the renegade is nowhere to be seen as the elder leads the cult in one final song of how they are the truest of people.

And now you know what to say the next time someone asks you, “What is the musical ‘Cats’ actually about, anyway?”

Task 3, which we began on Saturday evening and finished on Sunday, was re-colouring A Russian Affair.

I don’t need to talk too much about this because all my previous blogs talk about it. The short story is that our submitted version was not up to publishing standard, as far as showcasing the work that went into it was concerned. It did not do justice to Zac’s acting, Chloe’s camera work, Drew’s recording, any of the script work that went in… etc. etc. Suffice to say the learning curve here is that our editing model for Sparkle was the closest we’ve come to ideal, and we’ll be working on a post-production location for next year too.

Chloe, as you will all know, is a photographer at heart. This means she is well experienced at colour and lighting corrections in photographs. My copy of Final Cut Pro 7 came packaged with various other programmes from the suite, including Color. I’d fooled around with it a bit before, although I quickly learned that learning how to use Color and learning how to grade and colour effectively are two very different things. With the very basics of the mechanics in my head, I handed the iMac to Chloe to work some magic.

She got the gist of it very quickly – I guess Color (in its essence anyway) is similar to most other colour-correction image manip programmes. The main thing to be fixed was the interview scenes. In their original form, the lighting didn’t catch Zac’s face whenever he moved and we lost his expression. In my horrible attempt at fixing it, the background is washed out and the mic setup becomes visible in the left-hand corner (poor framing choice on the day – but it was very late in the evening). So the trick was to highlight Zac but not the background, and account for him moving around. Chloe knocked up a basic shape where the lighting should change, feathering it so Zac wasn’t too starkly different to the background, and then was able to tweak that shape for each shot.

Then, because she was having so much fun, she did a bit of tinkering on the flashback scenes too. The final effect is something a bit more saturated, a bit grey-er, more mysterious, more flashback-y. She showed me each version and asked for my opinions, as well as slightly tweaking the colour of the interview sequence, but more or less was able to handle the process while I happily knitted beside her. My knitting is coming along pretty well, by the way.

(Russian now needs to go to Drew to fix the audio balance. Again, on my awful hash attempt to fix it, all I could do to make Zac’s final lines audible was pull the music right down, completely negating the rising effect of the track, and generally sounding pretty awful. Drew knows more about properly balancing audio so we’ll be able to hear both at a good volume. That, and some new titles and credits, will be the extent of edits to the ‘Remastered’ version of Russian, and hopefully will be online soon.)

I think the #WeekendLockdown was a real success, not least for our fans who got to follow the whole thing on Instagram and Twitter. I have found that, with these projects which involve a lot of people, it’s easier to make progress when everyone else is making progress together. That’s the difference between Sparkle and Russian, or the 48-Hour challenge and most of our other projects. It’s partly deadline-related, but it’s also being surrounded by people who share your energy and goals and are also being creative and productive. Chloe has talked about a shared space for shooting and editing and general discussion – if such a thing could be pulled off, I’d be very excited to see what effect it had on our work.

My next stage is to write a proper shotlist for the Crossroads pickups and then arrange to meet with Chloe for the second Gun Hill Riffs music video we have yet to edit. Maybe the #WeekendLockdown hashtag will be back soon.

A few months back Chloe was asked to shoot some footage for Gun Hill Riffs, the band of a friend of hers. They had hired a studio space to record some songs and we decided to mainly get footage from two of them to put together two ‘live lounge’ style videos.

Because of a few last-minute changes of plans, we had basically no preparation for the shoot. As we went along we started outlining very rough outlines for each video, but in general the footage was a bit disjointed and without theme. One idea we decided to go with was a slow rotating shot from the middle of the band into which we would then splice some closeups.

With more time to prepare we would have preferred to have a solid plan for each song down early on, so we could better divide the work between us and give each song a distinct look. Hopefully we’ll have another opportunity to give that a go in the future.

The edit itself, our second task of the weekend, did not go as smoothly as the first. I had hauled my iMac to Chloe’s so Chloe could use Final Cut Pro 7 for the editing, but I ended up at the keyboard while we collaborated on the decision process. I felt bad because Chloe had specifically asked to use the programme, but in the long run it did make the actual process faster, which was probably for the best as the creative side was slowing us down. Hopefully we’ll have another chance to collaborate and I can hand over the iMac properly, when we know what we’re trying to achieve a bit better. Chloe had already logged all the footage, which I loved because it’s my least favourite thing to do, and we decided to use one of Chloe’s full rotation shots as a base shot, and choose clips to fade in and out of. Then it was just a case of covering up the bits where the camera didn’t hit the right marks and sliding in other more interesting clips in such a way that they didn’t clash with the base. We had footage from the other songs which we could fall back on in an emergency (I think we only used one in the end).

I was pleased with a lot of the footage I took, once I started leaving the autofocus alone. Some of the shots didn’t come out right, but I could see my intention in them, and I was pleased that I’d spotted them and chosen to try to get them, even if I didn’t succeed at actually capturing them properly. I also managed to nail one or two focus pulls, which I’ve been trying to improve at. I did notice that sometimes the point of focus was not in the right place, so that even though something was in focus, it wasn’t what the eye was trying to focus on, so the effect was lost. For instance when tracking down a close-up of the bass neck, the focus point was too far up the neck, and the middle of the shot (the natural focus point for the eye, I suppose) was out of focus. Hopefully I’ll improve at that over time.

Although the overall process sounds fairly simple, it took us long into the evening and over the next day to finish. Before it got too late we ducked out to make a start on Task 3, then watched “The Runaways” before bed. Maybe after all this we’ll form an all-girl rock band.

A few weeks ago, Chloe and I set aside a weekend to churn through a backlog of editing, colouring, movie-watching and general girl-talk. We had three main tasks:

Task 1: Plans for Crossroads, which we shot in April and which I have since been editing.

Task 2: Edit the music videos for Gun Hill Riffs, which we shot in June.

Task 3: Fix the colouring for A Russian Affair, which despite being technically finished has yet to be released (see here, here and here for details).

Task 1: Crossroads

Crossroads is a potential series originally pitched as a “Supernatural/It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia” crossover which turned out more like a “Shaun of the Dead”-style fantasy comedy. I wrote the pilot and we hired our first ever ‘studio space’ to shoot it over two days in March. I’m not really sure what the endgame for Crossroads is because I’m not really down to make a webseries and it isn’t entirely competition/festival quality, but I like the characters and the concepts so I’d like to keep making them.

The edit for Crossroads is more or less finished, but it has a few gaps. One of the decisions we made early on was to shoot in single takes (originally in a “Green Wing”-like style but it ended up more static), which meant that shooting went a lot more smoothly but that ‘problem’ takes are much harder to deal with in the edit. When I chatted to Bill about this, he pointed out that we were going out to shoot a final flashback scene anyway – why not get some pickups? Reaction shots can cover a cut between two versions of the same shot, and I realised there were a bunch of places where I could really use them. And we were already getting the boys back into costume…

One of my primary concerns with the edit was the second scene. It was one of my primary concerns on set, too: scene 2 was shot halfway through the second day, when people were justifiably losing a bit of momentum, and about ten minutes in I realised that my plan for the scene wasn’t going to work. It took us a short while to sit down and re-plan the scene, and then shooting it became a real headache. Although I was still fairly optimistic, I knew everyone around me was getting fed up, and I had no way to bring them up or make things right again. In the end all we could do was push forward with the new plan, and although it was difficult and painful, we got the scene shot. Thankfully the boys really turned it around and came through in the following scene we shot (almost in one take, first time).

The lack of prep for that scene really showed in the edit. Whatever I tried, I couldn’t make it flow. There wasn’t enough footage, or the angles didn’t line up, or people moved differently from shot to shot which meant they couldn’t be used together. Eventually, with Bill’s words of wisdom in my head, I hashed something together that ‘would do’, just for rough cut purposes. So I was not confident at all when this scene rolled around when showing the edit to Chloe and Matt. But Chloe was fully behind the scene, and I quickly realised that half of my issue with it was that it went some way off-script (and, consequently, off the vision I had in my head). And Matt, who hadn’t read the script and wasn’t on the shoot, also took no offence from the scene, and so I realised that despite its issues, it told the story fine.

And so we moved on. I pointed out the places I wanted to stick pickups in, and where Drew would be inserting his special effects, and Chloe offered a few suggestions as well. We talked quickly through the scene we still had to shoot, and then we put Crossroads aside for the night. That was one (admittedly the easiest and quickest) task off our list.

A few months back when Bill was going through the acquisition process, there became an opportunity to add some special features to the DVD, and Bill asked if I’d like to make a behind-the-scenes featurette and a director’s commentary. Of course I hadn’t been there to shoot anything during the shoot, but there was a handful of behind-the-scenes footage already, and we decided to shoot some interviews with the cast and crew, then stick them all in a room to record a commentary track. Phil set up the camera and Drew recorded the sound externally.

You can see the featurette and hear the commentary on your DVD, and I won’t go into huge detail about the decisions behind how we made it (on another blog, maybe). I did a chunk the edit, and as it got closer to the hand-in deadline, I gave it all to Bill to take over and finish up. As ever, there wasn’t enough time for me to get it as tight as I wanted. When I sat down to watch the final product for the first time on my copy of the DVD, I made a list of things I wanted to do differently next time I have the opportunity:

Put each interviewee in a different place – even if it’s just the other end of the sofa – to give it a sense of variety and also avoid the sense of jump cuts when changing from one to another in a near-identical shot.

Vary the background – having a selection of posters, or maybe screenshots from the movie, would have helped instead of always the same one. The white wall also appeared completely washed out and didn’t look effective, so some wall hanging behind would have helped.

Music – if we’d had time I would have liked music from the movie in the background of the whole doc, either a hash of various tracks or one central theme.

Jump cuts – when I began editing I tried to make an effort to cover any cuts in the dialogue with other footage or images, but didn’t have time to fix them all. I personally don’t like the effect of the ones which are left so I’d make more effort on that.

Images – something else I didn’t have time to finish was throwing in effects on the images, probably just simple pans and fades so they aren’t too static or abrupt.

Camera angle – in future I would definitely have either a) tried the interview setup at home in advance, to work out the best angle and distance etc., or b) turned up an hour earlier than the interviewees to work it out. We could have made much better use of the space and made the look much more interesting.

I love behind-the-scenes features, and I quite enjoy commentary tracks too. My favourites respectively are from Lord of the Rings and Shaun of the Dead. I’d like to get really good at them because it’s something I’d like to do again and be considered to do for other people.

And my favourite part is that the featurette says “Directed and produced by Ceri Williams”. So my name is on the DVD of a feature film which a bunch of people have bought. It’s a tiny thing but it’s exciting to tell people.

In the last two and a bit years we’ve completed and published four films (including today’s which sort of counts), but we have a further three in post-production right now, totalling seven productions under our belts. On average, each of these shoots costs about £100 all told. A big majority of that goes on food – shoots often last all day and sandwiches, Haribo and Capri-Sun are like Duracell batteries to a film crew. In the instance of A Russian Affair, we also put money into costume and supplies for fake blood, and we bought a bunch of bits and pieces for the props for Sparkle. But consistently, the Tesco run the night before is where the budget goes.

Seven shoots down the line I’d like to think I have a better grasp on what we need and how much of it. I thought I’d knock up a list.

Juice – Capri-Sun is a favourite, and orange and tropical are popular flavours. People will rinse through these quickly. Pick up a box of 10 for every 4 people.

Fruit – bonus is that it doesn’t get wasted, as someone will take it home at the end of the day. Apples are good because they don’t leave much rubbish. Bananas are a good sugar burst. Get a bag/bunch of each for a standard size crew.

Sandwiches – easiest and simplest way to get carbs into people. Shop-bought are, in my opinion, more expensive, no better-tasting, and also leave rubbish. A loaf of bread, block of cheese and several packs of ham works just as well.

Bonus: Get a list of likes and dislikes from your crew in advanced. Sounds dumb, but I don’t eat brown bread, and don’t forget your lactose/gluten/etc.-intolerants. Some people, when asked, will just offer to make their own – this saves you from asking them to but prompts them to think about the option of just bringing their own sandwiches. This means you don’t make too many, nothing goes to waste and no one goes hungry.

Haribo – no rules. Get lots. Get all of it. Seriously though, get two or three large bags of Starmix. Avoid the mini packs – they’re convenient for people to carry in their pockets, but just as convenient to leave lying around. Wear big pockets yourself and become instantly popular.

Water – even if you don’t think you’ll want it, keep a 2-litre bottle on you any time you’re away from civilisation (e.g. if you’re on location). You never know when you’ll need it, and it helps for washing hands, mixing up fake blood, creating mud to dirty up cast, etc.

Baby wipes – even if you aren’t playing with fake blood, get one or two packs of these for removing mud, butter, juice, real blood (just kidding) from fingers. People feel better with fresh hands. If you know you are using any amount of fake blood, get another two packs.

Fake blood – Zac Street helped us nail down the ingredients for this: 2 drops red, 1 drop blue, golden syrup, adjust thickness with water as appropriate. I would recommend 1x squeezy bottle of syrup per two bodies – that obviously depends on how bloody you want them, but that seemed to be how it worked out for us.

While I’m in list-mode, here’s some things I wouldn’t bother with:

Paper cups – we’ve had them a few times but they’ve always seemed like an unnecessary luxury. Unless you have a base camp with a catering table and someone looking after them (or more importantly, picking them up off the floor), I wouldn’t bother.

Cans – again, I’d only go for if we had a catering table. Boxes of juice pouches are lighter and the rubbish is easier to pack down and take away.

Energy drinks – let people bring their own. They’re expensive and most people can power through on Haribo. This includes canned caffeine drinks and sports drinks like Lucozade.

As a result of Russian, I put together a box of non-perishables which I can use for the next shoot. For my own reference, it currently contains:

2x bottles of golden syrup

2-3x bottles of red/blue food colouring

More baby wipes than I thought Tesco could stock

2x stacks of paper cups

I’ve a small list of kit and bits and pieces I’d like to add to this box for future – duct tape, penknife, realiable set of walkie-talkies, etc. Oh, and a clapboard. We owned at least three between us on Saturday and we still made Zac clap his own scenes.

I wanted to write a note to the team and also blog about yesterday and today, so here’s my combination of the two.

The plan for Saturday was thus:

Ceri ingests and organises footage, then puts together a rough cut; simultaneously, Drew syncs the audio and video from the interrogation

Ceri locks off the edit with the synced audio, then delivers the cut to:

Drew, to write the music

Phil, to record a foley track

Chloe, to colorise the footage

Aforementioned members of the team return their work to Ceri, to assemble and export a final cut and submit the film

There were a number of problems with the plan straight off the bat. I only pitched the idea of Chloe colorising the footage at the last minute, and although she was up for it, she’d have to come to me to use the Mac, which she wasn’t used to using – and she has a Real Job on Monday, so I couldn’t keep her up. I was the one who could stay up all night, but no one else could start work until after I was done. On top of that, Drew and I ran into issues with syncing the audio and video, which were exacerbated by his software failing to work and my failing to understand my software. Long story short, we didn’t lock off a cut until gone midnight, and Drew didn’t finish the soundtrack until around 3am. (Shoutout to Drew who had work in the morning and another project with a tight deadline to be doing.)

Phil, sorry I left you in the dark and was terrible and keeping you up to date, but sorry more that I couldn’t get my shit together quick enough for you to do any foley.

Chloe, sorry I couldn’t sort myself out in time to do any colorising – it would have been fun to work together on it.

Drew, sorry I kept you up late, woke you up early, and was generally difficult to work with. I owe you some croissants.

Also, Tull, sorry you couldn’t be involved. For what it’s worth, I think our method from last year – where someone who couldn’t make the shoot began the edit on Saturday night – would have been a huge help this year. Let’s do another Sparkle next time.

All of this would have been fine – we locked off the edit, with music, added vocals and even a tiny bit of colorisation from me, at 11am, two hours before what I think the deadline was. But it turns out even two hours wasn’t enough to save us from the ever-loathsome trap of export times. Getting the right export type caused enough hassle in itself, but coupled with the length of each export trial, then the issues of re-uploading it for submission, turned it into a minor disaster. We finally submitted, by email, at just gone 3pm. I’m still not sure whether we made it in time for judging, but they have been lenient in the past.

As I’ve said before, for my part at least, I’ve only ever entered SFL48H for the experience, practice, and deadline pressures it offers. I am immensely proud of everything we’ve come out with for this contest, but I don’t believe we’re in league (budget-wise, for starters) with the shortlisted entries just yet. That’s not the point. The challenge is not to compete, but to complete the film. We’ve done that, so I call that a win.

Where I feel like I fell down this year was on collaboration. Since we left a lot of the preproduction to the last minute, I ended up dictating roughly what I wanted us to do, rather than crowdsourcing ideas. And thanks to the aforementioned mini-disaster yesterday, post-production fell to two people, rather than the five or six people who could have benefitted from the experience (and enjoyment). Having said that, it is worth noting that we had more space for collaboration last year – the post-production Sparkle party wasn’t something we could have repeated this time round.

HOWEVER – big however – I’ve come away from this on a massive high, now that everything is done and dusted. I want to sit down and learn my software properly and get to grips with exports and teach myself some colorising. We did the bulk of our writing within the 48 hour constraints, which is kind of new for us, so we’ve got that going for us. We had what I felt was the hardest specs we’ve ever had before, and I love what we did with them. Most of all I love the film (sound issues aside). I’m super-psyched for Crossroads next month.

I hope, despite my ramblings above, everyone enjoyed themselves, like the final film, and felt that they gained something from the shoot. Better yet if that ‘something’ is two bags of apples. That’s another thing I gained. Whole ton of apples.

1. Photographer. I say this for every shoot, but we’ve never yet been able to secure a production-stills-only member of crew, even when we have plenty of people on hand.

2. BTS cameraman. This one’s harder than it seems – we got some behind the scenes footage this year, but it immediately filled up my card and I don’t think it’s as easy as it seems to do this well. Again having a dedicated person would be good.

3. Credits. On Sparkle I had to lock off before finishing the art effects I wanted on the credits, and in ’13 and ’15 we’ve had to forego them completely, just because it’s always left to the end. We tend to have a list of participants well in advance; there’s no reason someone artistic with a vague knowledge of FCP, iMovie etc. couldn’t be doing this on Saturday, and make them super-fly.

4. Social media. I like the idea of Twittering mid-shoot, but it always takes up more time than I think it will. I’d love to have someone on hand to tweet pictures and updates as we go along, just for the fun of it.

5. someone to interact with sfl so i dont have to

I’d normally say “Watch this space for the final product”, but why not watch this space instead…

I’m uploading the rushes from yesterday, behind schedule because I forgot to pick up a CF reader from Isherwood last night (or should say early this morning). It’s taking its time and preventing me doing anything else.

Yesterday’s plan:

09:00 – Meet in Guildford, buy costumes and snacks, get specs and make sure we had our prop.

10:00 – Drive to location.

11:00 – Begin filming.

18:00 – Run out of sunlight. Drive to studio, get fish and chips, dress set in record time.

19:00 – Begin filming.

22:00 (aka a reasonable time in the evening) – wrap, strike the set, disperse crew for a nice early night.

Yesterday in fact went thus:

08:00 – Chloe picked up an airsoft weapon from Nat (aka Nataraptor) after we remembered at the last minute that we needed one.

08:30 – Picked up by Chloe and brought to Guildford for tea with Phil, Zac and Olivia and wait for Chris to arrive.

09:00 – Went to Primark (aka costume department) to buy several white shirts and black trousers, while Chris and Zac went to Tesco for all of the snacks. Try to hang around long enough to receive specs in case we need to buy a prop.

11:00 – No specs as of yet. Set off to location.

12:00 – Arrive on location. Walk up and down non-pavemented road looking for a tiny pocket of 3G to check my email/texts.

12:15 – Realise by means of SFL Twitter feed that our specs are not coming by email/text this year, but are in the account.

12:30 – Finally get into account to access our specs. Have a mild panic. Rejoice that we have the prop already on us.

13:00 – Begin shooting on location. We had three cameras – Chloe’s as main, Phil’s as 2nd, and mine for BTS and pictures. We fill it up pretty quickly. Chloe and I share main camera handling as I need to practice operating and using a higher spec DSLR than mine. Phil and Olive shoot additionally on his camera. Highlight was Chloe being a dead body. Thought we got found by passers-by who turned out to be Matt and Drew bringing more snacks. Got fake blood all over white shirts. Nearly cut Chris in half.

16:30 – Ran out of things to shoot, despite it being light for a good three hours more and us having only been filming for about three and a half hours. Agreed that it was more sensible to head back and get a head start on the studio.

17:30 – Crash in various locations for tea. Pick up sound and lighting gear.

18:30 – Reconvene at the studio and start setting up. Send Matt and Chris out for fish and chips. Eat fish and chips.

19:00 – Sit down with Phil and Zac (while Chloe sets up lights and Drew sets up sound). Talk through world facts, the character, what we’ve shot so far and how that ties into a backstory, character motives, etc., in line with our title and line of dialogue.